


Laka (A moment in Time)

by ThatwasJustaDream



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: AO3 1 Million, Community: 1_million_words, M/M, Prose Poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-06-01 03:39:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6499318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatwasJustaDream/pseuds/ThatwasJustaDream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny takes an accidental, two second long video while on vacation and it stays with him forever. </p><p>*Warning- bittersweet story. Sad ending. Just saying. You've been warned.*</p>
            </blockquote>





	Laka (A moment in Time)

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize in advance.

The horse is brown and chestnut with a white stripe along the front of its nose. It has a look in its eyes - a way of kind of glancing back and rolling them that says it’s tolerating you, a pitiful beginner, sitting on its beautiful back.

You can’t see the white stripe in the video or the way it rolled its eyes but Danny remembers them; remembers their first ever vacation together, he and Steve (A week on a working ranch by the ocean) like it’s imprinted on his brain. 

On the video all that you see of his horse (Laka, its name was Laka) is its long neck, pricked ears and a fluttering mane as it walks at a content canter. Its mane is fluffy and a rose gold color, flipping and floating randomly as the breeze catches its hair.

Their horses made the excursion through the jungle and along the ocean look effortless - but the few times Danny had reached down to pet him he could feel the animal sweating in the Hawaiian sunshine; sweating as much as he was, thin trails of sweat running down Danny's back under his shirt. The fact that he was hot and damp? Was in long pants to avoid bugs and branches and…. none of that bothered him? That he was happy, for a shining moment -- perfectly and simply happy? 

It's one of the reasons he'll remember it always, like it was yesterday.

“Danny,” Steve says to him in the video, standing by his own horse. 

Steve is in beat up jeans and a black t-shirt, voice low and scratchy and he’s grinning that lopsided grin he saves for those he’s fondest of. Just the one word comes out of him but it’s stretched out with amusement - at Danny, at the way Danny is really throwing himself into this ride and this trip that was Steve’s idea. 

After he says his name, Steve chuckles and then Steve’s horse snorts.

Then the video does a weird thing where it slows down- almost a lurching kind of fast- slow- fast again thing, like an old time movie - Laka bobbing up and down in the frame like a real, live carousel horse and then… it’s over. 

Two point three seconds of video taken by mistake. Taken by a man who accidentally slid his camera phone setting to ‘video’ while trying not to fall off a horse. Deep green grass and blue-grey sky with decks of thick white clouds around them. Crenelated mountains in fifteen different shades of green and grey made by the sun and the shadows.

Steve is ahead of him and their expedition leader is ahead of Steve. A couple from Japan and a lady scientist on vacation are behind them but you never see them. Just Laka, Steve and their tour leader with the Ko’olau Mountains in the distance.

Danny wishes he had recorded so much more that day.

~*~

_That evening_

_The horse is shades of brown and chestnut …_

“What’s this?” Steve asks, and hits play again.

He’s flipping through Danny’s phone, looking at the pictures as they sit in a padded banquette on the outdoor patio of a restaurant on the water. They’re eating late and it’s quiet; them and a couple of other couples yards away.

“I goofed,” Danny says. “I hit ‘video.’”

“I’ll delete it,” Steve says like he’s trying to be helpful, but there's an undercurrent of something that Danny catches in his voice. 

“No! Don’t,” Danny grabs for the phone but Steve is holding it away from him, up in the air, chuckling the way he did on the clip. “Don’t delete it, please.”

“I look filthy," Steve's finger is reaching for the trash bin icon while Danny struggles for it again. "I look sweaty and…”

“Since when have you ever cared ….”

“….it looks like I’m laughing at you and I’m not.”

“…how you look? You are the least ….self-analytical….”

“You’ll use this against me someday. I know you will.”

“…person. No, I won’t.”

“You’ll show it to Grace and say, ‘see, he laughed at me our whole trip…’”

“Steven, please…..don’t.”

Danny knows how Steve really sounded on the clip: Fond and happy and vulnerable. Steve knows it too - that’s why he wants it gone.

He stops reaching for the phone, and (happily) giving up is what it takes to make Steve realize he means it. 

Steve looks serious for a moment, then he gives one of his patented ‘whatever’ silent shrugs and keeps flipping through the other pictures. He drops in and leans his head against Danny’s as he does; a kind of apology for being pushy. Danny lets him, nestles his own head on Steve’s shoulder and the moment passes.

Later, Danny sends the video to his personal email so it won’t get lost if the phone crashes someday.

 

~*~

_Sixteen months later_

“It’s going to be okay,” Kono says from his right, sets a hand on Danny’s leg, squeezing reassuringly as she nods at the phone in Danny's hand. “You’re going to see the real thing momentarily, I know it. The doctor will come out and tell you that you can go sit with him…”

He had hit play, sitting here on the bench against a wall in the critical care wing. He’d hit play on the clip and Steve’s voice had filled the hallway- the way he said Danny’s name, like it was something valuable; something that belonged to him.

“You’ve got ESP?” Danny says back at her, trying not to sound bitchy, knowing she understands how terrified he is. “‘That would have come in handy a few hours ago…”

“It’s not your fault,” she says. 

It’s all Danny had been able to say on the way here; Chin driving his car, going eighty miles an hour on the H3 to keep up with the ambulance. 

'All my fault, it's all my fault…' had poured out of him, as uncontrollable as the image in his head of Steve on the warehouse floor - lying there grey and still. Like a ghost.

All the times he’d told Steve that Steve was going to get them killed and….

“It _was_ my fault,” he says it again.

“You were ambushed,” Kono points out.

“I should have smelled it. The whole situation…. I should have smelled it.”

“Now _you_ have ESP?” She asks it as gently as possible. “Steve didn’t sense it either. None of us did.”

_Its mane is fluffy and a rose gold color, the hair on its neck flipping and floating left and right randomly on the breeze. Steve’s horse snorts right after Steve laughs, and the video does a weird thing where it slows down- almost a lurching kind of fast -to -slow and fast again like an old time movie._

_…and then..._

Danny almost passes out when the doctor walks through the door, because the doctor’s face looks so grim. But then he sees it: A glimmer of relief under the frown- a bit of hope in his eyes.

It’s a year to the day since they got married. Steve almost died on their anniversary; the closest of all the close calls they'd ever have in their jobs. 

Somehow, the pain of watching it on a day when he nearly lost Steve made the video less pleasurable. Danny can’t delete it, though. He uses one of those online time capsule program things Gracie shows him, to forward it to his email address - well into the future. 

Maybe he’ll be able to enjoy it again then. Way down the road, if it comes back to him. If he’s still around to get it.

~*~

_Way down the road..._

“Hey sweetie. How’d you know?”

“Know what, pop?” 

“That your dad could use a call from his brilliant, successful, jet-set daughter today?”

“Jet-set means rich, Danno. I’m not rich, I work for an airline….”

Danny always blamed Kamekona and that stupid frigging helicopter for giving his girl the bug to fly. To learn to fly a prop plane and then to study the workings of jets, the ways companies made money with them. She’d gotten her masters while working as a pilot. Then Danny caught a teensy break and she went into management and now…. he had to keep a calendar to know if she was in Hawaii or L.A. or London or New York….

“Yeah, well….whatever. You’re a far bigger cheese than I ever expected our family to be able to boast about, so….”

Grace was happy, so Danny was happy for her. And proud.

“How’s he doing today?” she asked, audibly trying to keep her voice chipper. 

Danny heard her worry for them both.

“He’s okay,” he lied. “He was alert all afternoon yesterday. So much more like himself, you know? He knew who Kono was when she and her son came by."

Steve hadn't remembered Chin, though; had looked pained and uncomfortable at what must have felt like a huge gaffe to him, a personal failing. Leave it to Steve to feel like he should be tougher than any brain tumor.

_“Danny,” Steve says to him in the video, standing by his horse in beat up jeans and a black t-shirt, voice low and scratchy. Grinning that lopsided grin he saves for those he’s fondest of…_

Danny hears Steve calling his name shortly after he hangs up with Grace. He heads upstairs to their room with a 'coming, babe...'

There are still days when he sees that grin - hears Steve chuckle. Just yesterday they'd sat on the lanai and watched one of the stray cats Steve insisted on feeding as it methodically stalked and attacked their garden hose. They'd both laughed their asses off at how it went _sproinging_ straight up in the air, paws askew, tail puffing out when water squirted from it.

Today Steve's not laughing. He's lying comfortably in bed but he looks so frustrated and confused and deeply miserable verging on tears. 

Danny doesn't have to ask why as he slides into bed with him and pulls him in close. He knows Steve's frustrated because he's accepting it: That things will never get better. 

Twenty-five wonderful years, they've had. But twenty-five more wouldn't be enough. No number would be. 

_Two point three seconds of video taken by mistake. Taken by a man who accidentally slid his camera phone setting to ‘video’ while trying not to fall off a horse._

The time machine app drops the clip back into Danny's email box the day after the funeral. He tries to play it, but he can't. It's an old format called quicktime that used to be so handy and play on almost any device, but now all Danny can do is scrub through it frame by frame. 

No video, no way to hear Steve's voice on it, now.

_They are surrounded by deep green grass, and a blue-grey sky with decks of thick white clouds everywhere; crenelated mountains, fifteen different shades of green and grey in the sun and the shadows._

Danny grabs a few frames of the video with that image-snapping-tool-thing Grace showed him how to use. He takes a bunch of grabs to get Steve's best smile, then realizes if he flicks through them fast it's almost like seeing him in motion again. 

He takes fifty more snaps. Then he deletes the video.

It's the only night Danny chooses to drink himself blind.

He prints the images later, at a drug store. Where you can make pictures on actual photo stock, the way God and Mr. Kodak intended. 

~ *~

_...and then ..._

"This one ..." Grace peels the picture out of the photo album carefully. "This should go on the board, too."

"But it's of Steve alone," her husband points out from where he's behind her, the two of them stretched out on the sofa at what she still calls "Steve's house."

Still, he puts it on the pile that they'll take to the service -- that they'll pin onto a board with all the other mementos of Danny's life.

"It was important to him," Grace explains. "That weekend, it was... important. A couple of days after this? It’s when Steve asked Danny to marry him."

Danny had seen a person or two, eventually. After Steve was gone. But no one who ever came close to anything serious. Grace had delicately suggested maybe he marry purely for companionship; that he had a lot of years to enjoy and... 

Danny had snorted like a horse. 

Like... _after what I had?_

Nope. 

"I wish I could have met him," her husband tells her. "Steve." 

"I know," she says, fingers running over another of the pictures - tracing along the horse's mane fluttering in the wind. "You would have loved him, too." 

_The horse is brown and chestnut with a white stripe down the front of its nose. Laka. It walks at an easy canter as Steve says Danny's name._

_The video does a weird thing where it slows down- almost a lurching kind of fast- slow- fast again thing like an old time movie, Laka bobbing up and down in the frame like a living carousel horse and then…_

_….it’s over._


End file.
